Perhaps the most misleading back-of-the-book synopsis I’ve ever read was that for Stephen King’s Insomnia. I can’t find the one on my copy online so I assume there are other editions with something far more accurate, but it described something about the townsfolk turning into demons and stuff when it’s actually an interesting adventure novel about an unlikely hero. I got through all apparently-800-pages of it without feeling like it dragged, though I was kind of disappointed it was just a tie-in to The Dark Tower, which I hadn’t read at the time.

In other news, it’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m too out of it to hate anything so now I understand what drives people to club all night because I can feel that dissociation from all that baggage and I’m not even sleepy so bring on the beat because I am going to hate tomorrow.

Down with a bad cold right now. It’s been hell trying to get through my weekend homework and it’s quite thrown off my schedule. However, I’ve noticed that for the past twelve hours, it’s felt like time has been moving at a third of the speed it normally does. I’ve been sick quite often in my life and came to know the ins and outs of colds — as a hypersensitive person, these things make quite an impression on me. However, I’ve never noticed this mental time dilation effect before.

Sure beats feeling nauseous when you swallow. That was the worst one, I think — was really hard to sleep that time. Last night, my sleep wasn’t bad compared to most times I’ve had a cold, despite the awful headache.

I also feel lucky in that I tend to get sick at the best times — that is, I rarely get sick when I really can’t afford to be. Only time that ever happened was when I got a flu during finals week on year. I think there’s a sort of biological mechanism that makes sure of this, but I’m too tired to look it up.

I was on a Google-search tirade searching for justification for my disdain for first-person present writing (which, dishearteningly, seems to have dominated the YA bestseller list as of late), when I stumbled upon this site:

As a novice fiction writer, it was like striking gold. Some of the sections rang hollow to me, but others exposed weaknesses in my writing that I hadn’t even noticed were there (mostly, passive voice is a larger category than I thought). The site’s strong point is its thorough use of examples to illustrate the author’s points. I’d heartily recommend novice writers looking to get a litmus test on their writing read through and draw what conclusions come.